The Rainbow of Experiences, Critical Trust, and God: A Defense of Holistic Empiricism

(Paperback)

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The question of whether religious experience can be trusted has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of religion in recent years. Kwan surveys this contemporary philosophical debate, provides in-depth analysis of the crucial issues, and offer arguments for an affirmative answer to the above question. Kwan first argues against traditional empiricist epistemologies and defends Swinburne's Principle of Credulity which holds that we should trust our experiences unless there are special considerations to the contrary. The Principle of Credulity is renamed the Principle of Critical Trust to highlight the need for balance between trust and criticism and is used as the foundation for a new approach to epistemology, the Critical Trust Approach (CTA), which maintains an emphasis on experience but attempts to break loose of the straitjacket of traditional empiricism by broadening the evidential base of experience. Kwan then widens his focus by looking at theistic experience in the contemporary multicultural context.

Reviews

"The argument to God 'from religious experience' is often presented as an argument from a very peculiar type of experience which religious people have, quite unlike our other experiences. This book is unique in describing so comprehensively and within one volume the data of many different kinds of related human experience, data often hard to describe and so easy to neglect. It thus locates the 'argument from religious experience' within a rich and deep background, which brings it to life and makes it much more plausible. I am very happy to commend this wide-ranging book, to what I hope will be a wide-ranging public." -- From the Foreword by Richard Swinburne, FBA, Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford, UK
"Kwan's book is an attempt to articulate an epistemology based on the notion of critical trust, a concept broadly based upon the Principle of Credulity articulated by Richard Swinburne in the assessment of religious experience. [...] He does not restrict his interest to religious experience, but articulates the place of critical trust to a 'rainbow of experiences' that include moral, aesthetic, theistic, and interpersonal experience, as well as our experience of the natural world, ourselves, and more. Kwan offers an epistemology that is an alternative to narrow empiricism (especially), foundationalism, coherentism, Popperian fallibilism, and skepticism. [...] Kwan's work is very clearly laid out, closely argued, and a fine contribution to a form of philosophy whose value he initially doubted." Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (Reviewed by Phillip H. Wiebe, Trinity Western University)

Author Bio

Kai-man Kwan is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. Richard Swinburne, FBA, is Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford